The Kyle Kauffman Gallery is proud to present Esther Mahlangu: Reacquiring, the first US solo exhibition by South African artist Esther Mahlangu.

Widely regarded as the most important Ndebele artist working today, Esther Mahlangu was the first to transfer Ndebele designs onto canvas. Traditionally, Ndebele painting is executed in large scale, colorful, geometric murals exclusively reserved for the exterior of domestic buildings.

Esther Mahlangu: Reacquiring is a survey of her most recent body of work. This latest exhibition will include a wide range of media: paintings, beadwork and sculptural objects. Chronologically, it begins with the finest examples of Mahlangu’s flat paintings – boards and canvases elaborately decorated in either bright commercial acrylic or muted natural pigments of cow dung and mud, utilizing only feathers and bundled-twigs as brushes. However, the focus of the exhibition is her most recent series of sculptures: contemporary objects such as trucks and signs, meticulously embellished in traditional Ndebele fashion. These objects – juxtaposing the old and the new, the abstract and the representational, the traditional and the contemporary – are the paradigmatic examples of the way in which her oeuvre is constantly evolving, breaking from convention and challenging the strictures of a customary art form.

In this work, Mahlangu appropriates emblems of war, terror and power – helmets, tanks, and police insignia – by literally encasing them in a web of geometry, line and color. Here, the abstract visual language of Ndebele supersedes its typical aesthetic significance and passive ornamental function to become an active agent of appropriation, a tool for reacquiring history and a pre-Apartheid past. For example, in Out of Unity, Strength, an authentic, vintage Apartheid-era police sign is swathed in the common palette that unites the ‘Reacquiring’ series.

Salmon pinks, burgundies and pure yellows, blues and greens are boldly outlined by strong black lines and deep white voids into vibrant triangles, polygons and zig-zags. Abstracted razorblades, Mahlangu’s signature motif, proudly emblazon the surface of the sign, whose official crest and Latin motto ‘Ex Unitate Vires’ (Out of Unity, Strength) are now subsumed by uber-dominant flat, even layers of paint. Here, Mahlangu triumphantly reclaims a time prior to apartheid, during which brutal displacements and forced removals scattered Ndebele families far and wide, estranging them from their brightly decorated houses, the symbolic affirmation of their identity. (C) Esther Mahlangu, all rights reserved.

*Attached image detail: Esther Mahlangu, Out of Unity, Strength, 2006

KyleKauffman|Gallery 355 West 39th Street New York, NY 10018 T. 212 594 8086 F. 212 594 8083 [email protected] www.kylekauffman.com

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